No "good morning" and "good afternoon" in Romance Languages?
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From François Lang:
I hope this isn't a well-known question. I searched LL for
"good morning" romance
and found nothing. So here goes.
(1) One can say "good evening" idiomatically in Romance languages, but not "good morning" or "good afternoon".
(2) However, all three are idiomatic in Germanic languages.
I'm wondering if LL readers concur, and, if so, have any explanations of these two points.
Just kidding here, but maybe the Whorfians would suggest that the passage of (day) time in southern Europe is more fluid?
I don't know about this. I think that I was taught to say "bon matin" in high school French a long time ago.
Selected readings
- "'Good morning' considered dangerous" (10/24/17)
- "Why plural days and nights in Spanish greetings?" (4/29/13)
- "Sinographically transcribed English" (12/26/10)
- "Transcriptional Chinese animal imagery for English daily greetings" (3/13/23)
- "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
- "Sinographically transcribed English" (12/26/10)
- Mary S. Erbaugh: "China expands its courtesy: Saying 'Hello' to Strangers," The Journal of Asian Studies, 67.2 (May, 2008),621-652.
Andrea Mazzucchi said,
July 17, 2024 @ 9:11 am
In Italian there are
buon giorno/buongiorno (good morning)
buon pomeriggio (good afternoon)
buona sera/buonasera (good evening)
buona notte/buonanotte(good night)
Funny idioms:
"buongiorno e buonasera": a superficial acquaitance
"buonanotte": can be used to express frustration/resignation
DJL said,
July 17, 2024 @ 9:24 am
I don’t want to be thick, and I may be missing something here, but this claim is nonsense, isn’t it? Can we have some examples from Germanic languages and the source of the claim for clarification?
I mean, buon giorno, buon pomeriggio, etc etc is that the point?
Ryan said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:21 am
I’m sure the point is that giorno, lime jour or diss, doesn’t correspond to morning, and in my experience can be used after noon.
cameron said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:22 am
I think "bon matin" is still idiomatic in Quebec French. I think in France it'd be considered a bit off, but certainly not completely bizarre or incomprehensible.
Ryan said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:23 am
tried to type like and dias. Phone keyboards!
Coby said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:39 am
Spanish has no "good evening" because it has no word for "evening" comparable to French soir or Italian sera, only the compound tarde-noche. One normally says buenas tardes before sunset and buenas noches after.
Catalan, however, has bon matí and (at least in Valencian) bon vespre.
VVOV said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:45 am
At least in my experience (not a native Spanish speaker), "buenos días" is almost exclusively used in the morning. There's "buenas tardes" for the afternoon.
Is the claim in the OP that Romance languages don't have a salutation that combines the direct translation-equivalents of the English words "good" and "morning"? If so, that's true of Spanish (*buena mañana), but I would argue that the most apt English translation of "buenos días" is "good morning".
Chris Button said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:48 am
Boa tarde!
J.W. Brewer said,
July 17, 2024 @ 10:49 am
My German is very rusty, but the claim that "good afternoon" is idiomatic in modern German sounded wrong to me and the first bit of usage-guidance I googled up (worth what you pay for it) confirmed that '"Guten Nachmittag" ist nicht üblich – verwende stattdessen "Guten Tag".'
And "good day" is not idiomatic *as a greeting* in current AmEng the way "good morning" or "good afternoon" are. Stereotypically, it is said with cold or hostile implications by someone trying to terminate a conversation/encounter, with "Good day to you, Sir" meaning more or less "now get the hell out of my face" in a more formal register. In a more friendly tone, one typically hears "have a good day" (or "a good one") at the end of an encounter rather than its beginning.
BZ said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:09 am
I guess it depends on how loosely you're willing to translate "afternoon". For example, in Russian (which isn't a Romance or Germanic language, but never mind that), you use the same word for "day" and "afternoon" (день), but they are two different senses of the word, so I would argue that Russian has an equivalent to "good afternoon" (добрый день) because it can only be used in the afternoon.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:17 am
For sinographically transcribed English "good morning" — at least two different ways — see this post.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2864
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 11:28 am
One of the favorite things of my childhood radio days: Paul Harvey — Good Day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiZi91a3ABw
DJL said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:30 pm
@Ryan, I see! I was being thick.
In that case, then, Italian does also have
buona mattinata (good morning)
which even though it is not very common, it certainly exists (my mum was very keen on it).
@Coby the RAE has Spanish 'tarde' as a word that refers to afternoon (at least to the period between midday and dusk):
https://dle.rae.es/tarde?m=form
Cervantes said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:40 pm
Yes, it's just that the exact divisions of the day to which the idiomatic expressions refer don't line up exactly. Buenos dias literally means "good days" (why it's plural is the more interesting question) but it is normally said in the morning. I don't know that people are necessarily sticklers about making the changeover to buenas tardes at exactly noon, or to buenos noches exactly at sunset, but that's basically what they mean. Perhaps people don't say "buenas mañanas" because it would be ambiguous. Mañana means tomorrow as well as morning, as I think most English speakers know. I suppose I could say "Buenas mañanas" to mean "have a good life." Anyway, the claim made by Mr. Lang is absurd.
Eric said,
July 17, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
I'm a French native speaker. We don't say "bon matin" anymore, it's archaic. We use "bonjour" during the day, "bonsoir" in the evening. "Bon après-midi" is used in the afternoon only when leaving, as is "bonne nuit" when retiring.
Then there's the more idiomoatic "salut" which works for greeting, leaving, at any time.
David Marjanović said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
I haven't encountered "good afternoon" anywhere in German, and I'm a native speaker.
On top of that, formal greetings aren't everywhere based on the time of day. In Austria, to people you're on a last-name basis with, pretty much your only option is Grüß Gott.
Daniel Barkalow said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:25 pm
Here's a Monty Python sketch involving the English idiom "good morning" and its usage, with subtitles in a romance language:
https://youtu.be/zP0sqRMzkwo?t=32
The translation clearly literally means "good day", but I'm not sure whether the objection that the greeting is inappropriate in the afternoon is true in translation, particularly with the later implication that it's definitely too early for "good evening"
Hans Adler said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:36 pm
As another native German speaker I can confirm that there is no equivalent of "good afternoon" in German. And I have an intuition that there never was, at least in the standard language.
However, it appears that ALL other modern Germanic languages except Icelandic either have an exact equivalent of "good afternoon" or use a phrase that literally (or at least etymologically) translates to "good noon" in this way. I checked even for Afrikaans, Faroese, Frisian, Luxembourgish and Yiddish. (These checks were very superficial, so I may be wrong for a few languages.)
Icelandic is well known to be the most conservative modern Germanic language. Standard German, due to how it was created and the role it plays relative to German dialects, is probably the second most conservative one. I guess this, like my intuition, points to "good noon" and "good afternoon" being relatively late innovations. (Of course these claims could be easily falsified by finding "good afternoon" in, say, Anglo-Saxon.)
An innovation with a similar meaning is currently arising in Standard German. In work contexts, and in work contexts only, in recent decades "Mahlzeit!" (literal meaning "mealtime", but originally used as "enjoy your meal!") has become a universal greeting around noon. It doesn't seem unlikely that in a few more decades from now this will take over from "Guten Tag" at noon and then, as happened to "good noon" in various other Germanic languages, gradually be generalized to apply during the afternoon as well.
Regarding explanations for these differences: I think these are just random variations. Having different greetings for different times of the day serves no real purpose (except to establish temporal context unobtrusively in a literal text). As the example of "Mahlzeit" shows, variations can come up simply as random restricted fashions, and then spread. (The reason "Mahlzeit" is popular as a greeting in a work context is the conspiratorial insinuation: "We shouldn't still be here, working. We should be sitting in the lunchroom, eating.")
Chris Butto said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:42 pm
Yet it's singular in Portuguese "bom dia", and also in "boa tarde" (good afternoon) and "boa noite" (good night).
JimG said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:53 pm
I sometimes wondered whether greetings and salutations, expressions of gratitude, references to time and weather, and some other formulae might have been rooted in religion, religious movements and belief structures. Examples include inclusions or reference to deities, e.g.
God bless you (after a sneeze)
the Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise (for hopes)
(God's) grace/blessing/mercy (for gratitude, vs personal thanks)
Exclamatory profanities that refer to deities
J.W. Brewer said,
July 17, 2024 @ 1:55 pm
Note that in the Paul Harvey clip (or compilation of clips) posted by vhm he uses "Good Day!" as a sign-off, albeit a friendly one, but uses "Good Morning" as his opener. That fits a somewhat more generous account of the facts of current-ish* AmEng usage than what I offered above.
*Harvey was born in 1918 – closer in age to (3/4 of) my grandparents than to my parents, and his usage of the "Good Day!" sign off may have been more common for his cohort than it is now in mine.
KevinM said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:29 pm
What, no Sapir-Whorf jokes?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
KevinM,
Hmm. Now that you mention it, why is it necessary to refer at all to the time of day when greeting or parting from someone at all? Why doesn't every language just have varying registers of formality for "hello" and "goodbye"?
What does identifying the sun's position in the sky at that particular moment have to do with the price of tea in China, Prof. Mair?
Y said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
There are two different pragmatic circumstances at hand. In English, for example, "Good night" is used as a sign off, wishing well to one who is going to sleep. "Good evening", "Good afternoon", and the obsolescent "Good day" are greetings which acknowledge the time of day of the locution. "Good morning" is in-between: it is used to greet someone who has (presumably) recently woken up, and also, variably, as a general greeting in the earlier part of the A.M.
Other languages, I assume, attach different meanings to their greetings.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 2:57 pm
Benjamin E.,
Well, if you believe that the position of the planets and the time of the day influence your mood and feelings, then it matters a lot whether it's morning, noon, afternoon, evening, or night.
Some people are very grumpy in the morning, and when you wish them "good morning", you sincerely hope that they will become happier anon, with or without the obligatory coffee (tea for the people who run out of steam in the afternoon).
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:18 pm
BTW, I often say "morning", "noon", "afternoon", "evening", and "night", without the "good" out in front, or just elide it to a mere trace of a "g'", likewise with the final consonant, which is barely there:
morning
evenin'
g'ni(t)
etc.
I think that is fairly common with many people I know.
I wonder how it plays out in other languages.
Russian: "g(ood) day" (dobryy) den' (добрый) день ??
Chinese: zǎo ān 早安 (lit., "early peace", i.e., "good morning"), but this is customarily reduced to just "zǎo 早", without the "peace", which is analogous to the "good" in the English expressions.
Chester Draws said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:26 pm
and the obsolescent "Good day"
"Good day" is obsolescent, but in NZ the contraction "Gidday" most certainly is not.
Australia too, I believe.
Victor Mair said,
July 17, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
@J.W.,
Thank you so much for commenting on Paul Harvey. His delivery was inimitable, especially the "Good Day", with rising intonation and unique cadence at the end of his news segment, but many of my friends and I jocularly tried to imitate him nonetheless and would laugh ourselves silly doing so.
When I got out of the Peace Corps (1965-67), which was like living in the thirteenth century, one of the first things I wanted to do was hear Paul Harvey's radio show — just 15 minutes. I would be glued to my precious wooden console radio for that. It had lots of glowing tubes inside and excellent speakers, so I could hear all the mellifluous nuances of Paul Harvey's golden voice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Harvey
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 17, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
Ah, so according to Y and Prof.Mair, the diurnal designation does denote something of meaning. So, when I say “good morning” to my wife, with all the attendant associations of “morning” cited above, is there “more” there, semantically, pragmatically, what have you, than quand Pierre souhait son épouse, «bonjour»? This question is specifically directed to Prof Sapir and Prof. Whorf.